The story of the extremely ridiculous Adventures of Commitment Man started on a squash court sometime during 2005, possibly as far back as 2004. A ridiculous starting point for a ridiculous project that has been the antithesis of commitment from the start. A number of years have passed since then and there still is nothing concrete to show for all of our ideas. We do rather like coming up with ideas, but all of us seem challenged when it comes to idea implementation.
Has that always been the point? We all do enjoy a bit of irony, and I’m going and spoiling it by actually trying to get something published. Not that I consider an internet publication to be any publication at all, but our rapidly moving times leave me at a loss for a better term. I refuse to coin something heinous along the lines of “publogation” that perhaps the internet famous may have conceived of.
Commitment Man was nickname for two particular squash partners playing doubles on the same team, and morphed its way into a series of absurdly Dilbertesque subplots. Killer-fighter gerbils (probably as a result of this guide to creating intimidating hamsters) and other nonsense, involving suicide bomber Buddhist extremists, snuck their way into the mix,
We started to think that we should choose one of the subplots and chop off the prefix, and then stick the rest of the subplots on to the newly created plot.
Everyone agreed that it was a brilliant idea. We all liked coming up with ideas, and so we all liked this idea to take the idea of commitment man beyond the idea into something less abstract and ephemeral. We were all truly enamoured with the idea of putting in some work to create an ideal creation that would be the pinnacle of creativity.
Despite these utopian ideals, the reality was more like four people forceably expelling a cesspool of faecal ideas and no-one willing to get out a mop and clean up the mess on the floor, sifting through it and salvaging the valuable bits. Dirty work and no hired help available.
Everyone else seemed to want to use the excuse of not having enough time to work on the project, because of minor details like having to earn a living. I was in the enviable position of being a kept man and looking to find ways to avoid carrying out any work on my M.Sc thesis. Again, the irony of the Commitment Man concept rears its scathing head.
The initial idea was to create a web-comic. Are few of these things are considered quite popular, even internet famous. Surely, we too could gain this virtual fame! And, as a direct result of our comic exploits and piercing wit, women would virtually rush up to us in the streets and rend their clothing asunder, and beg us to do imaginary things to them.
We even devised a novel viral marketing scheme for Commitment Man, which involved peculiarly eccentric posters stuck to bus stops and street lamps. It was such a well-crafted marketing ploy that I can remember no details of it, other than it was inspired by Brad Meyer.
Since everyone else claimed artistic disability, it fell to me to draw the comic, based on our cesspool of ideas. I had to supply my own sieve to get the good bits out. The dismal first effort may be ridiculed at your leisure.
There was no other attempt at creating Commitment Man using such a visual medium, and I think everyone is quite relieved.
Commitmentman.com existed in those days, but it was perpetually under construction. The construction consisted of that horrible comic, and due to the obvious manufacturing defects the responsible engineer never declared it safe, less the internet collapse under the strain of such poorly conceived and poorly drawn drivel.
It’s up there now and the internet goes bravely on, but the comic is clearly demarcated with DANGER signs and barriers, so if you go stumbling in there it’s really all your own fault.
Finally acknowledging my failings as a comic artist, I decided to redirect my efforts at bringing Commitment Man out of our minds and into a more permanent medium by discarding the sketchpad and picking up the notepad. I would write the Adventures of Commitment Man in a novel format and, since I am actually capable of constructing coherent and occasionally witty sentences in the English language, I felt my chances of successfully completing the project at a reasonable level of quality was high.
For a time there was a wiki hosted at commitmentman.com where we attempted to hash out concepts for the story I would eventually write, and the four enthusiastic idea-smiths contributed their offerings. After the initial burst of enthusiasm, all that was left was a dormant, unmaintained wiki. Now even that has been demolished.
In 2006 I discovered National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it is referred to. NaNoWriMo is a personal challenge to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. From our multiple sessions of brainstorming, wiki-ing and general goofing around, I had collected enough material to write something that could almost be considered to involve a plot.
I wrote furiously for the first week of November 2006, but when I realised that I couldn’t completely postpone my life to write a novel that is likely to never provide me with any income, writing rates underwent significant attrition. In the end I churned out 20,000 unedited, misspelt words, which occasionally conspired to form sentences that the average English speaker would comprehend. Reading all of those sentences still would leave you with a half-formed foetus of a story.
This project has been a long time in gestation, and I’m tired of being pregnant with it. It’s time to go through labour and bring this thing into the world. It’s going to hurt, and I don’t expect the labour to be short (nor do I have the option of an emergency caesarian section).
I am hoping for an epidural, at least, but I don’t even know what that means in the context of this metaphor.
The Adventures of Commitment Man will be born, and if this unholy child of mine (conceived of four fathers and no mother) is physically hideous and malformed, or mentally retarded, or both — then so be it.
